The Rogue's Gallery

9:54PM - Bogus Virus Warnings Imbedded in LJ

Okay, I can't stay silent any longer. For the last five days I have been getting bogus Windows Explorer virus warning popups on my computer whenever I am on Livejournal. It has happened five or six times, only on Livejournal.

These popups say you are infected with numerous viruses. When you try to close the first window, it takes you to a second one that appears to be scanning your computer and it then shows various and numerous viruses your computer has with dire warnings. When you try to close that window, it tries to download a virus protection program (Yeah right!) from somwhere, at which point a "real" Window pops up and says "Are you sure you want to download this program? It may harm your computer." But it won't let you exit the fake windows (and in some cases will begin to download a program, even when you tell it not to). The only way to escape the mayhem, is to shut down Internet Explorere all together.

Now, I have really awesome protection on my computer. And I have run my anti-malware after seeing these dire messages. There are no viruses on my computer. This is all a ploy to get you to download viruses by making you think you have them already.

After the third incident, I e-mailed LJ support. That was 2-3 days ago. Meanwhile, I see several people on my LJ friends list saying they have been fighting a virus and some have lost massive amounts of info.

Is this all just coincidence? Or is there a bogus virus program imbedded in LJ that only I am aware of?

I really love my LJ. It is improtant to me. But I am getting really sick of having this crap pop up, scare the s**t out of me, and no one seems to be doing anything.

If you have had this experience, please comment here and also e-mail LJ support.

1:43AM - jury duty

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

12:04AM - tweets, twits, and bullet points from the collective unconscious

( My Daily Tweets )
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11:46PM - Homeless Memorial Day

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

10:18PM - (working for the black gas)

When two cats who don't like each other want to sleep on the same small wool throw, a monkey's foot works well as a Line Of Ignoring.

10:03PM - Photos from the December 16th reading at KGB with Andy Duncan and Christopher Rowe

We had a wonderful set of readers last night and here are the photos

10:05PM - The Gingerbread House of Shame

So, I got fired from my job today.

Some of you may remember that I worked at a candy store. How do you get fired from a candy store, you ask?

Well, allow me to show you how, in pictures.

( How to get fired from a candy store: )

Sigh. Really, it's just one of those days. I really did enjoy working there, and I'm sad that it had to end on account of something so ridiculous. We took it home, and now it's sitting on our dining room table, a testament to my (now former) job. I mean, if I got fired over it, I may as well enjoy the hell out of it, right?

So, umm... Anyone know where I can find a job?

5:07PM

Today I got to climb into the ceiling at the bookstore to find a dead mouse. In a trap the Orkin guy claims to have checked twice in the past week. (The stench has been there well over a week.)

Good times, good times.

3:39PM

The Mythbusters attempt to polish, well... a turd.

This amuses me because "turd-polishing" is a common phrase bandied around SFF workshops, meaning the act of fiddling with the sentences and commas in an essentially broken narrative.

Even if you succeed, well. What you have is a high-gloss turd.

2:00PM - Twitterated

• 16:39 BWA HA HA HA! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0gzL-3_CAg&annotation_id=annotation_605670&feature=iv #

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1:15PM - what can't be cured must be endured....

Time for a pot of what my friends and associates lovingly call Death Drops. (ecinacea, hibiscus, rose hips, ginger, lemon, red pepper, and honey.)

Cures what ails ya.

Or at least distracts you.

12:06PM - i guess i picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue

so far this morning: contracts and tax paperwork printed (4); epic battles with printer and TBRE's... idiosyncratic... wiring structures (6); epic battles with my own piles of office clutter (2); epic battles with kjitten over just who exactly gets to stand on the printer while it's printing (umpteen).

The printer router the beloved netcurmudgeon set up for me appears to have died the death (I wonder, somehow, if cats are responsible) so I had to crawl around under the desk and hook the printer up directly to the desktop, and then port files, and then--

And all this while not feeling so hot, and in the throes of PMI (Premenstrual incompetence. Hormones give me brain fog.). And then the dog decided that it wasn't too cold to go chase the ball for a VERY LONG TIME before doing his business, which meant somebody had to throw that ball. Somebody inadequately dressed, with cold hands, because see above brain fog.

So that was my morning.

Is it too early to start drinking?

temperature this morning: 15 wonderful degrees (-2 with windchill (F, not C: I'm an American barbarian.)
tea today: orange passionfruit
teacup today: asian (Japanese? it's kind of borderline in size and design) teacup from San Francisco

I'm in the midst of a caffeine detox, just in case the weird fits of anxiety I've been having are triggered by the buzz. (I suspect it's more deadlines and incoming! baby and deadlines and slow-paying publishing industry and deadlines and coming to terms with my spinsterhood and deadlines. But the caffeine is something I can control.) While I don't consume a lot of caffeine (I drink a lot of tea, mostly green, and occasional black tea or coffee) I've noticed in the past few months that black tea or coffee in the evening will actually mess up my sleep cycle, which is new and unexciting. And I did NOT react well to the chai I had on Monday, or the coffee Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, after 72 hours without my drug of choice, I am feeling the effects--those headaches, I tell ya. Stuff is vicious. And I appear to be coming down with something, given my absolute failure to perform at the climbing gym yesterday (hawkwing_lb had all my mojo. Don't ask.), the pain in my neck, and the occasional slight productive cough. No fever, though--I'm right on the money a degree low, just as I always am.

Given all this, the fact that Grail is sitting at 185 pages, and the Impending Hoolidays, I have decided to take an advance on my Time Off as sick leave cum lazing about. Today I will read contracts and make some notes on Grail because I was brilliant in the shower this morning. And I am going to cuddle up with a peppermint-and-lavender-soaked barley pillow. And if any writing gets done, well, it gets done. And if it doesn't, well, that's okay too.

Basically, I'm going to putter and not set any goals. And hope my headache eases up a little. (Today's tea is an herbal blend with a little bit of green tea in it, so there is some caffeine, but not so much I would drink it for the energy boost. But it will probably take the edge off the discomfort, anyway.)

4:43AM - Late night mystery post...

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/12/late-night-mystery-post.html

Hullo everyone. I took a week off from Blogging, then didn't have a second during the whirlwind of the last few days.

As a result of which I have dozens of open tabs and dozens of letters to the FAQ line that I've marked as things I should answer. I'm not going to try and do them all now (Maddy told me that I'm taking her to school at 6:30 am, as she's got her first period of Driver's Ed). But there are a few things I should say before I sleep...

The first one is to congratulate Henry Selick and all the Coraline team (and Laika, and Focus) on the wonderful way they are being recognised by Awards. Yesterday, for example, we learned that Coraline is nominated for a Golden Globe award.

There's a great website at http://awards.filminfocus.com/#/coraline/awards which is a bit out of date right now. My favourite of the recent awards is that the Alliance of Women Journalists gave Coraline their Best Animated Character award, although the biggest honour is Coraline being on the American Film Institute's list of the ten most important films released in 2009.

I went to Atlanta. It was foggy and thunderstormy and I signed for 1,050 people. (Here's the Atlanta paper blog on the event. And Little Shop of Stories said Thank You so very nicely.)

I went to Winnipeg. It was cold outside and I signed for 869 people. Here's the Winnipeg Newspaper article. Just behind me, in the grey shirt, is the wonderful Elyse Marshall, publicist from HarperChildren's, who looked after me on the Graveyard Book Tour and who can now run a huge signing in her sleep, which is great, because it means I don't have to worry about any details or disasters. I just do my job and sign and meet everyone.

(How bad can it get? Well, there was the time Terry Pratchett and I were signing in, er, I think it was Leeds, when the people who worked at the shop saw all the people who had turned up for the signing and got scared enough that they locked themselves in the staff room at the back, leaving Terry and me to climb onto tables and shout at people until they formed some kind of a line. The staff didn't come out again until the people had all gone.)

Strangest moment in Winnipeg was getting back to the hotel room at 1:30 am to notice that, beside my bed, a framed photo of my children had mysteriously appeared. I assumed that this was a cool thing the hotel had done. Elyse, on the other hand, was convinced it was the action of a crazed stalker, and insisted I deadbolt and security chain my hotel room, and was enormously relieved, a few hours later, when she knocked on my door and I removed the chain and was obviously still alive.



Before we left the hotel I took the photo out of the frame and left a thank-you note in its place.



Flew back to Minneapolis. I stopped off at DreamHaven on the way back from the airport this afternoon, and signed more stock for Greg (http://neilgaiman.net/). Theoretically enough to see him through Xmas.

Several people wrote asking me to express my outrage at HarperCollins joining several other publishers in delaying the release of books on the Kindle or e-book format to some months after the hardback comes out, as detailed at http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/harpercollins-now-also-thumbing-nose-at-e-book-industry-with-dig/ but after I read the article I couldn't manage any outrage at all, no more than I could manage for people who demand that paperback books come out at the same time as hardbacks. It seemed a legitimate way to publish, anyway.

And, for those of you who want to learn exactly how an author should not respond to an Amazon One-Star review, we present an author named Candace Sams, who begins by pretending she's not the author, just someone defending a good book, then, when outed as the author, claims she's part of a noble group standing up against an evil one-star reviewer, and then informs everyone on the Amazon Comments thread that she's reported them all to the FBI. The Amazon Thread is here. Teresa Nielsen Hayden comments on it at Making Light, here. (Via Cleolinda's twitter.)

And yes, it's a horrible car crash, and I post it here not because it's funny in an Oh God Make It Stop kind of way, but because, if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning. (Also, if you're an American Games company, don't sue a British blogger in the Australian courts for a bad review.)

Oops. I have started blogging. I will stop now, and sleep for a little while.

...

Before I go: Sky has a website for the Ten Minute Tales series, which includes Statuesque, my film starring Bill Nighy (which goes out in the UK on Christmas Day) : http://sky1.sky.com/10-minute-tales. I wish I could have been at the screening in London on Sunday, more so when I saw my old friend Paterson Joseph stars in one of the films.

1:00AM - posted on request

arielstarshadow (edit: got it wrong the first time; so sorry!) asked in comments to this post how I go about making playlists and soundtracks for writing. At this point I've become a bit more systematic about it, so here, in case it's useful to anyone else, is my system.

( I wasn't always this organized. )

Here's the interesting thing about the process. Some authors, as a revision tool, outline their book after they've written it; that helps them figure out just what they're doing with their story. This? Is my equivalent. Deciding what deserves to have a song, I've realized, is a form of outlining, and then the actual selection of music forces me to think about what exactly I'm trying to convey. This is somewhat true of the character-related selections, but especially true of the ones that soundtrack specific events; I use a lot of film scores, which means I'm listening to various pieces trying to find the one that really matches the arc of that scene. No, I want something that sounds creepier at the beginning, and then builds in a slow crescendo rather than going loud really suddenly, and then it needs to cut off right after the climax, without a long denoument -- I learn a lot about my story by going through this process. And sometimes, yes, I'll listen to a piece and decide that while it doesn't match the scene I have, maybe the scene would be better off if it were more like the music. Mostly the soundtrack gets matched to the story, but not always.

I will, as requested, post more about specific instances of the relationship between music and my work, though not tonight. It's going to be a bit tough, since the discussion won't mean much if you can't hear the song in question; I'll have to see what I can find online. But we'll see what we can do.

12:57AM

So we got Guitar Hero: World Tour (aka Guitar Hero IV) for the PS3 last night. Great deal, only $28. Should work with Rock Band games, as well as the other Guitar Hero games. This will be awesome, right?

Tonight I set it up and put the disc in to play around and make my avatar...and learned that I can't plug all three peripherals in. The game comes with a guitar, drum set, and microphone. The guitar and drum set are wireless, having antenna that plug into the 2 USB ports on the front of the PS3. The microphone has a cord...and no USB port to plug into because the two on the front are already taken by the drums and guitar.

wtf?!

So...anyone know how we fix this? Do we get a USB splicer so we can plug in all three, or am I stupid with electronics and not know what I'm doing? This is a PS3 specific issue as far as I can tell, and the user reviews on Amazon don't mention this problem. There HAS to be some sort of solution, but I don't know what it is.

HELP!?

EDIT: talked to a friend who has a PS3 and he said a simple USB splitter will fix the situation. YAY!

6:51PM - When Fiction Jumps the Shark

Hopefully, you are familiar with the term "jumping the shark". But if you aren't, according to Wikipedia "jumping the shark" is a colloquialism used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a television program's history where the plot spins off into absurd story lines or unlikely characterizations.

The phrase originates from a Happy Days episode in 1977 when Fonzie jumped over a shark on water skis, but the phrase was coined later by Sean J. Connelly in 1985. Jon Hein, who created the website jumptheshark.com explains it as "a defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on...it's all downhill."

Hein's website listed 18 categories that fans used to identify shows that had "jumped the shark", including 1) Same character, different actor 2) death of a key cast member 3) Moving the main setting and 4) birth of a baby on the show.

Recently, I've become aware that it isn't just television shows that jump the shark. Speculative fiction has its fair share of shark jumping as well.

For example, I consider a piece of fantasy to have jumped the shark when it suddenly throws me down Alice's rabbit hole without any warning. A fantasy series I am currently reading has just done that very thing. The first two books went along swimmingly, with two worlds (one magical, one not) that co-exist alongside one another with portals in between. The two worlds are in conflict with one another and each has a distinct culture, people, and history, all very well explained.

Now, I am reading book three and suddenly the MC enters a third world, a dream world full of mad-hatter type characters, no day and night, deformed people without names, and buildings that are inexplicably larger on the inside than the outside. The story, so far traditional fantasy, has now become surreal fantasy, something I don't generally read or enjoy, and I feel gyped. I want to toss the book, except I paid good money for it, and I keep reading, hoping this is some kind of glitch and soon we'll get back to the "real" story. And this isn't the first series to do this too me. It seems to be a current trend.

I'd list this as item #1 on my fiction "Jump the Shark" list.

1. Going Wonderland

What events constitute "jumping the shark" for you in fiction.

Feel free to mention specific books and events, as I'm going to try and collect a list.

12:05AM - tweets, twits, and bullet points from the collective unconscious

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11:37PM - "She's arguing with the doctors." "That's good."

Criminal Minds 5x11, "Retaliation," written by Erica Messer, directed by Felix Enrique-Alcata

( How long can you keep us safe?  )

( The size of your honor guard determines your status in Hell. )

3:12PM - Latin form of the name 'Humphrey'?

I'm writing a story, and I'm here via little_details, and it is a very small detail. But I can't find this anywhere - I've tried baby-name sites, and the Duke Humfrey's Library site at Oxford University. Though it's a Germanic name there must surely be a formal Latin version for offical documents???

Thanks in advance!

ETA: Asked and answered in the space of hours! Thanks, guys.

5:50PM - Letters of Recommendation

I really want to apply to a PhD program, but I don't think I can get any letters of recommendations for a number of reasons. Well, although I finished my MA, I wasn't very social with professors. I rarely visited office hours and didn't really do anything above and beyond to deserve a professor writing me a letter. The professor who I worked closely with wrote me a letter of recommendation that I can use when applying for jobs and said that he'd be happy to tweek that letter when I do apply for PhD programs. Anyone else in the same boat as me? What were some of the things that you did to still apply?